Richard, nice to hear from you.
You are right about the missing side guards and the single cross bar.
You do however sometimes see one cross bar only, even on newer katars like 18th to early 19th century, but they also have side guards which gives a better stability.
This is the earliest katar I have seen or heard of, so I dont know what it looked like fifty or a hundred years earlier, but it must have been a very early form.
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